I'll read one more, which I like to call "Slaughtered
from the Infantry."
It's not exactly a portrait of one man.
It's a composite portrait of three or four guys
I knew who had really been in the infantry in World War II.
It's called "Portrait from the Infantry."
He smelled bad and was red-eyed with the miseries of being
scared while sleepless when he said this--
"I want a private woman, peace and quiet, and some green stuff
in my pocket.
Fuck the rest."
Pity the underwear and socks, long burnt,
of an accomplished murderer, oh God,
of Germans and replacement, who refused three stripes to keep
his B.A.R., who fought, fought, not to fight some days like any
good small businessman of war, and dug more holes than
an outside dog to modify some Freudian's thesis--
"No man can stand three hundred days of fear
of mutilation and death."
What he theorized was a joke--
"To keep a tight asshole, dry socks, and a you-deep
hole with you at all times."
Afterwards, met in a sports shirt with a round wife,
he was the clean slave of a daughter, a power brake
and beer.
To me, he seemed diminished in his dream, or else enlarged,
who knows?, by its accomplishment--
personal life wrung from mass issues in a bloody time
and lived out hiddenly.
Aside from sound baseball talk, his only interesting remark
was, in pointing to his wife's belly, "If he comes out
left foot first"--
the way you Forward March!--
"I am going to stuff him back up."
[LAUGHTER]
"Isn't he awful?"
she said.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]